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You know how people talk about fancy food like caviar and Brussels sprouts? "Oh, it's an acquired taste." That usually means "tastes like crap, but we eat it for other reasons." When it comes to Assassin's Creed, though, I think this tired old horse of an idiom is as fair an assessment as you're gonna get. Some folks -- those who enjoy a meticulous approach to puzzle-solving and generally stalking about -- will enjoy the series' ethos. Others, who prefer more excitement and pizzazz, would be better off elsewhere, at least generally speaking. With Bloodlines, the PSP-only iteration that takes place between Assassin's Creed I and II, you've got a taste that's markedly harder to acquire, because the game's design amplifies the series' weaknesses while its chosen platform mutes its strengths.

Taking place just after the conclusion of the original Assassin's Creed, Bloodlines is set in Cyprus which, if it resembles the look of this game in reality, might be the drabbest place on earth. Levels are, almost without exception, laid out in simple squares of territory, walled off, and populated by beige or gray buildings, with little in the way of color or flair. As Altair, the game's main character, you'll spend most of your time running around on the even more dreary roofs of these buildings, since staying on the ground means running into an endless stream of Templar hostiles you'll either have to elude or swashbuckle with. Not that buckling swash isn't fun, but after a dozen or so encounters with the less-than-inventive AI you'll have buckled enough swashes to fill the hold of your very own pirate ship.

Of course, you don't just run around rooftops at random, as you're generally tasked with killing some poor slob somewhere on the island. It's never quite clear why you need to go about this in an assassin-y way, though, since you can easily best almost anyone in a fight, and you can often simply run up to the luckless fool, destroy his guards and then give him what for with the pointy part of your sword. Sometimes the game will force you to remain hidden during a mission, but this just makes things feel less "freeform" (a selling point of the series), and more "do it the way daddy told you." And what kind of assassin listens to daddy?

Now, none of this would be particularly different from the original Assassin's Creed (apart from the puny, cookie-cutter level design), but Bloodlines suffers from being overly ambitious for its platform. The PSP simply can't hang with the series' vaunted gigantic cityscapes and beautiful graphics. Instead, everything feels, for lack of a better term, like a Diet Assassin's Creed. The original, console version of Assassin's Creed had a lot more meat than there is here -- for all its repetitiveness, that game still had a world of places to explore and people to do in. On PSP it's the mission and that's it. Well, you can help out some random needy person, or search for some hidden Templar coins, but this feels shoehorned in, and doesn't grow organically out of the mission design. And while it is possible to use accrued points to upgrade Altair's abilities, Bloodlines offers no true, RPG sense of leveling up -- just a veneer that feels hastily added.

Now, having said all that, Bloodlines does recreate the basic character feel of the console title with as much verisimilitude as you could expect on a portable. Those who enjoyed the high-flying acrobatics of Altair will get to somewhat experience that here, thanks to the game's smart control system. This system employs the shoulder buttons to create context-sensitive actions, greatly expanding your options beyond the relatively few buttons on the PSP. For example, pressing the right shoulder transforms your standard actions into high-intensity versions: X goes from jump to sprint, and O allows you to make a running tackle. Also, you can use the left shoulder to make the buttons control the camera, allowing you to quickly and easily move and look around. If this game does anything extremely well, it's simplifying an intricate control system for a portable console (if only it could've done the same with the graphics and gameplay). Beyond the good controls, though, fans of the series will mark the many nods to the original's gameplay: hiding in haystacks and roof gardens to evade pursuers, making leaps of faith from the tops of minarets, and the return of Altair and his female Templar rival as major characters.

So, here's where I tell you that fans will like this game and dilettantes would do well to stay away, though really there's not enough here for anyone other than the hardest of the hardcore, dying to get their knife-to-the-jugular fix after blowing through Assassin's Creed II. If that's you then you could do worse for your PSP, but most gamers are probably better just sticking with the real deal.